Linking the name Bardem with literature is also possible beyond the long shadow of an eminently cinematographic family. A task handled by the eldest of the brothers, a Carlos Barden that since the 90's he had been making his forays into narrative. Although it has been in recent years when it has ended up standing out within a black gender that he makes very his own in setting and characters.
And I say that he makes it his own because we do not find in his novels a pure noir with its investigator, the case, the twists and subterfuges through which a typical plot leads us. And yet, that same dark tone is marked with equal intensity by underworlds where they try to hide secrets and pasts.
Violence in tune with a world violated by circumstances. Characters that are impelled to actions that they would never have wanted to preserve their life and that of their loved ones. Revenge or its search as the essence of an action that aims to resolve pending cases ...
Top 3 recommended novels by Carlos Bardem
The Maverick Killer
Nothing better for a serial criminal than having that nonconformist spirit, that creative vision (rather destructive in these cases) that leads to the execution of the perfect murder in substance and form. Without clues, but with the theatricality of the most capable disturbed minds in the recreation of death, a hireling of death has to be that born nonconformist, like the good painter you commission to make your kitchen look like new...
Fortunato is a hired assassin, cultured, elegant and discreet. When he is commissioned to eliminate a corrupt politics, he remembers his childhood and youth, how he felt violence grow inside and what he did to control it and use it, according to him, for his own benefit and that of others. But this sentimental education is only the beginning of a journey that will take you through the darkest and most violent scenarios of our society and will make you rethink your role in it. A decades-long odyssey through Madrid and settings like New York, Zanzibar, Baghdad, Stockholm or Morocco. And it is also the story of a murderer in love, the X-ray of a couple. Will you be willing to sacrifice the love of your life to follow your ideals to the end? Will this be your last assignment?
Using a worked prose full of irony and intelligence, Carlos Bardem makes the prodigious portrait of a charismatic and complex antihero trapped in a society dominated by immorality and corruption. After the success of White Mongo, the author combines the crime novel, political satire and social denunciation in The murderer nonconformist, an original story of love, humor and death.
White mongo
The past, the guilt, the justice. What one can become in the innermost part of each one and what ends up being, if there is a difference or an abyss. Nothing better than life taken to the extreme to achieve that kaleidoscopic vision of existence and achieve lucidity despite everything, with a terrifying truth that slides until the final judgment of each one.
After the death of his father, the young man from Malaga, Pedro Blanco, sets out to sea in search of a better future. Thanks to his expertise and willpower, he climbs ranks to become Mongo White, one of the great slave traders of the XNUMXth century. But the betrayal of a person very close to him will lead him to the beginning of his fall from grace.
This is how he tells his doctor from the asylum in which he is locked up without suspecting that his story is not over yet, since someone from his past has returned to collect an outstanding debt. In the twilight of his life, Mongo White he will have the opportunity to redeem himself or to be finally a victim of his excesses.
Spain, Cuba or Africa are some of the settings for an enveloping story richly set, profusely documented and written with an astonishing level of detail and emotion, that no lover of the historical novel, of adventure or of literature in general will be able to miss.
Scorpion in love
A shocking story about a contemporary Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers hostage to the violence of urban tribes. «I'm going to tell you my best story. That of the woman who could be invisible and that of the boxer who only lost in dreams. Not long ago it happened, here, in this city. But it started years ago and, in part, a long way off. Beyond the Sea…"
Carlomonte is an old drunkard with a glorious past as a boxer who makes a living telling stories in neighborhood bars and bars in exchange for wine. This is one of her stories, that of Alyssa, a Latin American immigrant who as a child was handed over by her parents to a child prostitution ring and who now makes a living cleaning houses in Spain; and Julián, or «the scorpion», who embodies an entire initiatory journey through which he learns to channel violence, from a skin group to professional boxing; From family abuse, to Alyssa's love.
In his third novel Carlos Barden It introduces us to a web of squalor and tenderness populated by losers, skins, illegal immigrants, drunks and fledgling boxers, where an unforgettable love story shines like a flash.